


Let our weakness speak

by Vaznetti



Category: Spooks | MI-5
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-20
Updated: 2010-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-13 20:15:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,303
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/141336
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vaznetti/pseuds/Vaznetti
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is no life outside the Grid.  (Harry and Ruth, post season 9)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Let our weakness speak

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ellia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ellia/gifts).



1\. I was in Hector's confidence, so far as it went.

He knows in the moment before the door yields to his hands, the moment he can feel that the door will yield, and what that yielding means; it is a word which could not apply to anything of Ruth's. Harry opens it nonetheless and takes a step or two into the flat. It is bright and impersonal, a few rows of books on the shelves and a cardigan hanging from a hook by the door the only recognisable signs of its owner. Now that he has come this far, he will have to do the rest, so he continues through the flat, his hands at his sides, to ensure that he is right: she is not here, she does not need his help. Her bedroom is as neat as the rest of it, a square depression on the duvet to mark the place her suitcase lay while she packed it. She is gone.

He could still return to the Grid, to Dmitri's uncertain sympathy and Beth's refusal to meet his eyes, but there is little point. The last thing he wants is to encourage them to fight for him. It is only fair, after all, that someday a Home Secretary would get rid of him.

He says as much to Malcolm late that night, with the bottle of whiskey half-empty between them. "That's enough," Malcolm tells him, and leads him up the stairs to the guest bedroom. At least he leaves Harry to take off his own shoes and loosen his own tie.

 

In the morning, Harry eyes Malcolm over a cup of coffee; he is reasonably sure that Ruth has told him where she went. Of course, he will not ask, and Malcolm will not volunteer the information, particularly not there with his mother sitting at the kitchen table. He could return to Ruth's flat and look for the clues she has undoubtedly left in the books missing from the shelves, the clothes gone from the wardrobe -- but no sooner has he thought of it than knows that he will not pursue her, not in such a tawdry way.

Malcolm is watching him as well; Harry puts the cup down. "I should go."

"Home?" asks Malcolm.

Harry almost says, _back to work_ , because Lucas' death has done nothing to unmake the very real threats his country faces. But now he, too, is one of those threats. An agent under investigation should never be allowed into the Grid. He would never have allowed it -- he _should_ never have allowed it. He should have reined Lucas in when Ruth first raised the alarm; he has no desire to discover precisely how lax his replacement is. "Home," he concedes.

He lasts a little over an hour in his own flat, pretending to read while he listens to the clock tick away the seconds. He tries the club he is usually too busy to visit, where he makes it through the Telegraph and the Independent before giving up on journalism; he isn't used to reading anything that doesn't come with an analyst's notes.

 

He cancels the lunch with Catherine; what does he have to say to her? He cannot answer when she asks him how he is, and there is no need to warn her about the investigation; the entire matter will be kept confidential. He will retire; men of his age retire all the time.

 

The next time he visits his club, Alton Beecher settles into a chair near his. Harry rustles the pages of the TLS irritably, but when he looks up Beecher is still there. "What?"

Beecher shifts in his chair and stretches his legs out in front of him "I see that you've been..." he trails off.

"Reorganised?"

"Is that the word?"

"So it seems." Harry smiles thinly. "And don't bother."

"With what?"

"Whatever offer you're going to make."

"I wouldn't dream of it," Beecher says. He sounds serious, but Harry can tell when he's being mocked. "It's not as if my employers have any interest in how well your job is done."

"That's enough," Harry says, and shakes the journal open again.

He is a little surprised when Beecher stands. "All right then," he says. "But if you ever get tired of reading magazines, you know where I am."

 

2\. I was the unwelcome third at the meetings of Tristan with Isolda; they tried to poison me.

Ten days after he let himself in to her flat, Ruth knocks on Harry's door. Her face has darkened slightly while she was away. "You went to Cyprus," Harry says as he steps back to let her in.

"You didn't know," she says. "You haven't been in the Grid." From her tone, it's an accusation, not a statement.

"In my position..." he starts to say.

"You're protecting the Grid from yourself," Ruth says. "Why?"

"So long as I'm under investigation, I am a security risk." He already knows too much, is too dangerous: where all the bodies are buried, and not just the bodies.

"Because you, Harry Pearce, are going to betray your country." She is still standing in the hall, her hands in her coat pockets. "That's ridiculous."

"It's been suggested before."

Ruth stares at him a moment. Her eyes are lighter than he remembers; a trick of the light, he thinks, or of her slight tan. "This isn't about this investigation, or any of the times your loyalty has been questioned. It's about Albany. Because you were willing to give it to Lucas." In exchange for me, she doesn't say.

"And I would do it again," he says.

"Even if it had worked?"

It is unthinkable, of course: a weapon like that would barely be acceptable in the hands of his own government. There at least he could ensure that it was never used. In the hands of their enemies... But Ruth is staring at him, her mouth turned down. "Of course not," he says. But the decision would have destroyed him.

She seems to understand what he hasn't said, as well. "We keep going, Harry."

"I don't think I can."

It is a relief for him to be able to tell the simple truth, but her lips are thin. She takes her hands from her pockets and shifts her weight slightly, so he steps back and lets her walk past him into the sitting room. He watches her as her gaze flick over the room, and tries to see it through her eyes: the old leather chair and sofa, the worn books on the bookcase, a handful of photographs on the mantelpiece. Whatever she sees in it, it isn't something she likes: when she looks at him again her face is tight with disgust. "How dare you?" she says. "How dare you give up, after everything?"

Harry forces himself not to flinch. "Even I may get tired of making the necessary sacrifices -- why shouldn't I, after Ros, and Jo, and Adam and Fiona, and Danny and Zaf, and all of them--"

"Because of them," she snaps. "Because of Jo and Adam and Danny and all the others. Why should we have the right to stop when they didn't?"

"I was ready to be killed," Harry says. "I'm not prepared to send anyone else out to die. How can I -- I _trusted_ Lucas!"

"And because you were wrong this time, you're giving up."

"What would you prefer? That I let Lucas kill you? You begged me to save George's life -- don't you remember that?" He knows it is a mistake in the instant before he finishes saying it, the instant he sees her hear what he's said.

The anger doesn't bleed out of her: it evaporates suddenly, replaced by something much worse. She stares at him, white-faced. "I can't stay here."

Of course she can't stay; he is an idiot. "Ruth," he starts, and then to the empty room, "I'm sorry." He hears the front door slam shut behind her.

 

3\. I was the just impediment to the marriage of Faustus with Helena; I know a ghost when I see one.

An old friend, now an English tutor at Brasenose, invites him up to Oxford for lunch; at least, he imagines, the CIA is unlikely send Beecher to follow him there. It turns out to be another kind of proposal: the warden of their old college will retire in the next year. They walk over before lunch and stand before the lawn in the front quad: it seems smaller to him now than it used to, as if the walls would hold him in. He can remember how it felt when he came up to Oxford for the first time, the fierce delight of knowing that he deserved this, deserved to belong here, among the fine old stones and arched windows, and the statues of the founders staring down at him; but that boy is long gone.

Back at Brasenose, he lets the lunchtime conversation float around him, taking part as necessary as he listens: a conference is being planned to his left, the two tutors to his right are discussing a disciplinary case, an undergraduate who set something on fire in his room. Harry considers a future of such conversations, a future worrying about fundraisers and herding academics. It is the sort of thing men like him do, after they retire. Defection sounds better and better.

At coffee James is called away to discuss some kind of college business, and Harry find himself sitting by an older woman. James introduces her, quickly, as the retired professor of Roman history. It is, he guesses, a typical Oxford conversation: he explains that he had been at Wadham with James, and she discloses that she taught for Corpus before she became a professor. He takes a breath and has done with caution; he asks her whether she ever taught an old colleague of his. Ruth Evershed. It is not, exactly, breaking cover, but it is not exactly proper, either.

"Ruth Evershed?" the woman asks. "At Corpus. Yes, I remember her now: a very bright girl, focused on philology. We would have liked her to stay for the doctorate, but she had other ideas." Is it his imagination, or have her watery blue eyes sharpened slightly? Harry bows his head. "We were sorry to lose her, then. And of course, again, when we heard that she had died. Did you know her well?"

"I thought so," Harry stands. "When James comes back, will you tell him I was called away?"

"Of course," she says. And he isn't wrong about the sharpness. "Please remember me to... whomever you think of."

 

This time he knocks on the door of Ruth's flat. "May I come in?" he asks when she opens it.

"Of course."

He follows her back to the living room. It is much the same; different gaps in the shelves, and a blue and white bowl he hadn't noticed before on the table. "I'm sorry," he says. "What I said before was unforgivable. Are you all right?"

"What do you want, Harry?" she asks.

 _I want you to tell me how you really are, how your visit to Cyprus was,_ he thinks. But what that means is, _I want you to give me something of yourself. I want that moment of delight in my victory, when you agree that we should be together._ She is staring at him with a mixture of impatience and concern. "I don't know. What do you want?"

"Harry," she says again: a question, not an answer.

"What do you want, Ruth?" he asks again. "When are you planning to let yourself come back to life? When will you accept that you survived?"

"What are you talking about?"

"How many people outside Section D know that you're alive?"

"What would you have suggested? Postcards? An email circular? 'I'm back from the dead, how are you?' It isn't that easy." She sounds surprised rather than angry.

"It's easier to pretend to be dead already than to try to live," he says. Once he has said it he can see how true it is, and not just for her.

She nods. "When we've seen so much, so many of our friends..." She closes her mouth..

"Ruth, no." He needs to go to her, to take her hands in his own, and forces himself to remain still. "I don't want that, not for you, not for either of us. You deserve more than that -- and I know I can't give it to you, I understand that," the words are tumbling out now, "but I love you, Ruth, body and soul, and I want-- I think you should--" and just like that, the words are gone. _I think you should leave me, leave all this behind, go live your life, be happy._

There are tears on Ruth's cheeks, but her voice is almost level. "Harry," she says, the third time, "what do you want?"

 _You,_ he thinks, _not some pale ghost of you. You, alive._ But he can't say that. "What I want doesn't matter. Do you think it would be better if you left?"

"And went where, or did what? My life is here."

"Such as it is."

"Such as it is," she says firmly. No sign of weakness now.

 _I love that you are stronger than I am,_ he wants to say. _I love that I can trust you, even when I cannot trust myself. I love that you will never marry me, that you will quite probably never allow me to take you out to dinner._. "Very well," he says. "Then I suppose I should go find a way to keep my job."

"Good," she says. She almost looks relieved; he wonders whether she would let him buy her a houseplant.

End.

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to my yet anonymous beta-reader. Title and section headings from W. H. Auden, Memorial for the City (June 1949).


End file.
